Sunday, September 02, 2007

Dragon*con 2007 Sunday: No Pix for now...

Very simply, I don't know how much time I have left on this Internet connection. Also, checkout will be early tomorrow and it's late right now. So I'll give a quick summary of this day.

I did not get into the Adult Swim panel. I arrived 15 minutes before the panel - since I desired food - and there was a line running outside the building and down the block. There was no way I could have gotten into that panel. But the only thing I believe I missed were pilots and clips from shows that will already be on AS in a few weeks anyway - Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil being the one they pushed the most.

So I went to the final panel for which I was scheduled, called "Classic Cartoons." An Indian lady named Smitha Prasadh used to do this panel, but spent time in Japan and Hawaii. Now that she's back, she organized this. This was a fairly lively panel, and I recorded much of it - although how much of the audience questions will be heard will depend on the miracle of audio processing.

There were many arguments about the definition of "classic" but it largely came down to things such as character, plot, quality of scripts and animation (roughly in that order). Some people suggested some cartoons that I thought were anything but classic - The Critic? But it was all in very good spirits.

I will attempt to contact the animation track director and help her throughout the year, if I can, to bring better animation panels and guests to Atlanta.

In other matters, I helped Luke Ski with his sales table, and bought the Filk Guest of Honor her dinner. (As I mentioned before, she is Carla Ulbrich, a lovely, petite woman half as tall as I am, with an amazing self-depreciating sense of humor.) As a personal treat, I stayed up late to listen to Luke in a live concert, down in the teeny room assigned to filk - and packed with more enthusiastic people than the hyperactive fire marshal would be happy with. I even dared to sing along with my favorite parts of "Grease Wars," his description of Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope told to the music of Grease.

In some ways, Dragon*Con has been disorganized, more than normal; shifting different groups to different places has made the convention harder to deal with than normal. But it's still one of the most friendly big conventions I've ever known. And I look forward to being part of the animation/anime program next year.

I'll tell you more when I get back to Orlando and have a chance to recover.

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